Until now, most Federal agencies built their computing architectures like the aging buildings that house most of their headquarters, as huge monolithic structures that are inefficient, require frequent maintenance, and are wholly inflexible. Now, companies like Red Hat are offering a new path using microservices technology, which takes huge application stacks and breaks them down into tiny, modular components that can expand or contract based on needs, eliminating waste while ensuring critical services are always available regardless of future usage spikes.
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Artificial intelligence is sexy–no doubt about it. From self-driving cars to personal assistant technology that can anticipate your every need, the future of AI looks promising. However, the actual technology can be confusing. And rarely does the reality of AI match up to expectations created by Hollywood portrayals.

Pentagon leaders say they’re serious about getting ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) game, which increasingly could include the “games” involved in the modeling and simulation programs used for training.

The Trump administration has a fever for curing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse (FWA)–in fact, this is perhaps the most important Three Letter Acronym in Federal IT today. So, GAO’s January report on the shortcomings of CMS Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) and the fact that Medicaid improper payments hit an estimated $36.7 billion in 2017 raised temperatures across government.

The Air Force wants to take the idea of a virtual assistant to the next level, with a system that not only draws from existing information to answer questions, but puts some additional thought into helping airmen make better decisions. This is accomplished by quizzing them about what, precisely, they plan to do.

The Trump Administration’s proposed $4.4 trillion budget for FY2019 would add some money to the cybersecurity pot, supporting ongoing programs and manpower levels, while cutting back on cybersecurity research and redistributing where the research money goes. Administration budget requests are largely political documents whose numbers won’t hold up once Congress gets done with making the sausage, but they do reflect White House priorities.

David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat public sector has some words of wisdom for Federal managers seeking ways to move from legacy applications to more agile environments: modernization is not just about adopting new technologies and practices, it is about what happens to the old ones.

Sometime in May, the Army will take two armed, autonomous Humvees out onto a gunnery range to test and certify them as combat vehicles, which will make them the first robotic ground vehicles to be OK’d for combat.

The Trump Administration proposes spending nearly $45.8 billion on IT investments at major civilian agencies next year, a slight rise from the $45.6 billion in fiscal 2018, according to the 2019 budget proposal released Monday.

It is not uncommon today for agencies to use multiple cloud services such as Amazon Web Services for putting up computing resources on demand, Salesforce for customer relationship management applications, and either Google or Microsoft for email and collaboration tools.